The Old English Peep Show by Peter Dickinson Page B

abbey they pulled down at Scambling at the dissolution of the monasteries. That’s when my family started to come up in the world, you know—the early ones had a knack of backing the right kings. But have you ever noticed how they all seemed to build their houses in hollows, and it wasn’t really till Queen Anne that people started building in places where you could see something from? The Abbey’s the center of Old England now, with plastic ghosts popping out from behind panels, and tape-recorded clankings and wailings. But it really is old, and not at all phony, so it’s always a wow with visitors.”
    â€œWhat else do they like?”
    â€œThey like everything. Harvey’s very clever about that because he has this craze for authenticity. The duel always goes very well, because two of the visitors actually do the fighting and a couple of our people act as seconds and tell them, very po-faced, about all the etiquette that’s expected of them; we do that on the Bowling Green, which has the most super echoes. Then there’s a highwayman who robs a coach and they catch and hang him—it’s terribly convincing. . .Hello, Maureen seems to be expecting us.”
    They had rounded a corner and another wire gate lay before them, but it was already open, held for them by a woman wearing the same mobcap and sprigged apron as Mrs. Chuck and Claire had at the main gate, but wearing them with a difference. Behind her rose four bizarrely foreshortened towers with onion-shaped roofs, as though a section of Brighton Pavilion or the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal had sunk, by some freak convulsion of the terrain, into the ground until only its topmost pinnacles were showing.
    â€œOh, Miss Anty,” babbled the woman, “your hair appointment. Miss Whatnot, your new secretary, was speaking to me of it on the telephone.”
    â€œBloody Hades!” said Mrs. Singleton. “When was it supposed to be for?”
    â€œThree-thirty, she did be saying.”
    Mrs. Singleton looked at her watch.
    â€œOh, that’s all right,” she said. “I’ve just got time to talk to you about the inventory, if the Superintendent doesn’t mind waiting, then I’ll hare back. Mr. Pibble, do you mind if I get my job done first, and leave you? A girl comes to friz me up, and it doesn’t seem fair to keep her hanging about. I’ll send someone over to fetch you.”
    â€œCan’t I get back round the outside of the fence?” said Pibble.
    â€œWell, you could, if you don’t mind walking a bit farther. And it’s a bit overgrown, I’m afraid. Actually, it’d be a great help, because we’ll all be busy giving the afternoon lot tea out of tiny little tinkling cups. It’s much more of a nuisance than the sherry the morning ones get. I’ll only keep Maureen for five minutes now, so perhaps it would amuse you to look at the old Tiger Pit—it’s rather your sort of thing, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    She waved, a gesture of seductive dismissal, toward the stunted minarets, and walked off with the woman in the mobcap toward a white thatched cottage which lay about thirty yards down the slope, under a superb sycamore.
    â€œFine,” said Pibble, not even surprised that she hadn’t waited for his assent.

PART II
    THE LION GROUND
    Once he lay in the mouth of a cave
    And sunned his whiskers,
    And lashed his tail slowly, slowly
    Thinking of voluptuousness
    Even of blood.
    But later, in the sun of the afternoon,
    Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill
    He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws
    And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a slit in his eyes.
    â€”D. H. Lawrence, “The Beast of St. Mark”

3:10 P.M.
    P ibble leaned over the parapet, and gasped: his first impression had been right—it was an Oriental building sunk two stories into the ground. He was looking down, as if